In Defense of (Studying) Food
A Classical Zooarchaeologist’s Manifesto
People always ask me what the coolest thing I’ve ever found on a dig is. I don’t mention that I excavated some of our earliest evidence for fire in a Stone Age cave, or that I helped find the Griffin Warrior Tomb at Pylos with all its bronze armor and gold jewelry. An intact toilet at a taverna in Pompeii would’ve been cool if it hadn’t had a faint whiff of Roman urine.
I tell them I’m most excited when I find bits of dead animals mingled in food trash.
Our society’s focus on “cool finds” and museum-worthy objects highlights elite material culture. But these days, archaeologists focus on people and the traces their cumulative actions (culture or society) have left behind. Mostly, they do so by looking for patterns in dead people’s trash.
Take a moment and check out your trash can. What do you see? If you’re at home, chances are a lot of it is food waste; the largest trash can at home is in the kitchen for a reason. A recent study by La Vergne Lehmann found that food accounted for about forty percent of household waste in Victoria and New South Wales, Australia. Food. That doesn’t even include all the packaging materials or containers the food is transported and stored in.
The same was true in the past. From stone tools and ceramic containers to animal bones and carbonized seeds, food trash is abundant at most archaeological sites. What’s more, the archaeology of ancient food doesn’t just tell us more about how people lived in the past — it can help us plan for an increasingly scary future.
I’ve learned that there are still classicists who believe in the Indiana Jones ideal of archaeology. Nearly ten years ago, a prominent archaeologist asked me, “Why study animal bones? The texts already tell us what the ancients ate: beef, chicken, pork, lamb, and goat.”
At the time, I didn’t have a good answer. I was at the beginning of my career as a zooarchaeologist (= animal bone expert). But I knew that very few people had ever bothered to study ancient Greek animal bones. The potential for discovering an interesting pattern seemed pretty good.
Most people think this kind of study is about identifying ingredients (beef, pork, etc.). But, think about all the chicken dishes you’ve ever eaten — from fried to roasted to General Tso’s. Far more goes into the cultural construction of a meal than a simple list of ingredients. To me, the study of ancient food is about understanding a society’s food system. Where did that chicken come from? How was it reared? What cuts was it butchered into? Where were its bones deposited, and how do they relate to other food refuse?
Simply identifying a bone as a chicken bone isn’t enough. I also want to understand, through bones, about foodways: the cultural relationships entwined in the food system, from production to processing to storage to consumption and eventual discard.
When a student group comes to the Wiener Lab in Athens, the first thing I do is pass around two chicken drumsticks: a twenty-first century tibiotarsus that we’re all familiar with and a drumstick excavated at an ancient Greek site.
Modern drumsticks look so different. They’re roughly textured and appear obese in contrast to the elegant length and intricate details found on an ancient tibiotarsus. I joke that modern drumsticks come from a Frankenchicken, a bird so warped by twentieth-century breeding, poor nutrition, and cramped factory farming that its bones look malformed compared to its ancestors’. The industry nickname for these Frankenchicken is “broilers.”
Our appetite for chicken (the most popular meat in America, though not so commonly consumed in ancient Greece) has rendered traditional chickens a dying breed. In Albanian villages, these heirloom chickens are nicknamed “village birds” (zogj fshati) in contrast to the more common Frankenchickens found in supermarkets. In my experience, village birds are delicious, bursting with flavor and juicier than factory-farmed broilers. But they’re also so small that they’re a meal for one or two people, no more.
Holding the remains of a two-thousand-year-old meal in my hands reveals the realities of ancient foodways. Equally important, a comparison to the chicken bones left on my own plate gives a new perspective on our modern foodways.
The remains of foodstuffs provide evidence not only of what people used to eat, but also for how food was produced and processed. Like the drumsticks above, the size and shape of bones can help us get a sense of animal breeding practices in the ancient world.
For example, we generally think that “animal improvement” (breeding for larger sizes) was related to Romanization, since new livestock and food production regimes were introduced following conquest. But a recent paper by Angela Trentacoste and others has shown that cattle and sheep were bred for larger sizes in Northern Italy prior to Roman conquest.
Besides introducing absolute units, what did the Romans bring to many of their newly conquered cities? Pigs.
In urban environments, pigs have several advantages over other animals: they produce large litters and eat scraps. As fellow omnivores, pigs have teeth that look like our teeth. Archaeologists frequently mistake dirty pig teeth for human teeth in the field. Excavation slows in anticipation of an unexpected burial until some jerk like me tells them, nope, those are just pig teeth.
It’s not just the size of a bone that matters. Valasia Isaakidou has shown that cow foot bones from Neolithic Knossos have pathologies most likely caused by repetitive stress from plowing. Jane Gaastra and others published an overview of similar evidence at different Neolithic sites. Trashed cow feet are rewriting prehistory by demonstrating that cattle were used to bear loads and plow agricultural fields thousands of years before our earliest artistic evidence for plows or wheels.
Butchered bones reveal how animals were transformed into cuts of meat. At the site of Azoria on Crete, my current project, it seems that people ate the same animals (mostly goats) during large-scale feasts and at home. However, different cuts of meat were eaten at each venue. While people used smaller knives at home, the butchers at feasts processed animals with large cleavers. These butchers knew what they were doing, too, as the bones were chopped at consistent locations in a manner sharply different from those found in household refuse.
My research shows cleaver butchery is also related to urbanism. In larger cities like ancient Athens, chops from cleavers are more common on bones than slices from knives. These differences might seem small — after all, both a T-bone and a New York strip are tasty — but they’re larger than you think. Most steaks or chops, as we know them in America, weren’t popular until recently in human history. They’re easily produced thanks to mechanized bandsaws that cut through bone. Our industrial foodways define what we eat. Similarly, ancient bones show that the development of larger cities created a new, urban cuisine in the ancient Mediterranean. And people loved these new, processed foods.
Sometimes, however, you learn more than you want when you poke through someone’s trash. Cutmarks prove that dogs were consumed more frequently than we like to imagine in ancient Greece.
Every major bone assemblage I’ve studied has at least a few examples of dog bones butchered for meat. Even dog cheeks were consumed occasionally. In fact, in the commercial markets of ancient Athens, the butchery patterns for dogs seem to resemble those of pigs! The truth is in the trash, as I don’t know of any texts that record these details.
Texts are, in fact, seriously lacking when it comes to telling us how people actually ate. For example, Hesiod’s poem On Works and Days, with its emphasis on elite plow oxen, is our best textual source for ancient Greek agriculture, even though few consider the poem an accurate representation of agricultural practices. He doesn’t mention the famous Greek olive trees! And the only detail he gives about rearing pigs is that boars should be castrated on the eighth of the month. Remember to sharpen your knives on the seventh …
Our picture of food in the ancient world requires radical transformation in the twenty-first century. We’re misled by all the accessible sources around us: ancient texts provide an incomplete picture and our own modern foodways, despite being urban, are different from those in the ancient Mediterranean.
Have you ever really thought about how a field of wheat becomes a loaf of bread? Of course not. Like me, you probably buy most of your bacon shrink-wrapped and divorced from the pig whose salted and smoked belly you fry up for your weekend breakfast. To understand the food of the past, we need to think away our industrial economy and understand ancient foodways as a form of indigenous knowledge that went unrecorded by society’s upper crust.
You’ve probably seen a few pictures of art and monuments in Pompeii, but the object photographed below upends our picture of ancient agriculture:
Wilhelmina Jashemski adapted the technology used at Pompeii to create casts of ancient people, animals, and ancient plants. These root casts provide a stunning snapshot of agricultural practices in the region as a form of biodiverse polyculture. Rows of one crop intermingled alongside rows of other crops: olive orchards and vineyards mixed together.
This picture of food production starkly contrasts with the monoculture we see planted throughout the industrialized world. Today, you are more likely to see a vast field of the same crop, or a huge enclosure packed with the same animal. The introduction of chemical fertilizer and the divorce of animals and plants has created a new food system where each variable is detached from a larger agricultural ecosystem.
However, there are distinct advantages to polyculture—mixing a diversity of plants and animals in the same landscape. As Michael Pollan has pointed out, “…monoculture is poorly fitted to the way nature seems to work. Very simply, a field of identical plants will be exquisitely vulnerable to insects, weeds and disease.” Producing multiple species, each with different requirements, means that if one crop fails (e.g., due to a dry spell), another can thrive.
It’s not even the case that modern methods are more productive than ancient polycultures. Several agricultural science studies demonstrate that increasing biodiversity increases yield per unit of land. An agricultural rotation that includes additional crops increases long-term returns. Even if an entire growing season is given over to a soil-regenerating fodder crop (e.g., alfalfa), long-term yields are higher.
Harvests are also greater when chemical fertilizer is replaced with manure from animals grazing on fodder or stubble. Animal and plant byproducts, instead of being the pollution they are now, can nurture a biodiverse agricultural ecosystem that is less reliant on artificial inputs.
Ancient people were neither primitive nor stupid. They supported large urban societies across the world, using agricultural methods that were very different from ours. Ancient polycultures sustained these urban civilizations for many centuries.
And they might help rescue ours.
Environmental archaeology is a relatively new field. With each study, we improve our picture of ancient foodways and their relationship to big topics: empire, urbanism, and climate change.
As modern climate change intensifies, we can look to the past to find examples of other civilizations grappling with their own shifting environment. One hotly contested question in Mediterranean archaeology is whether climate change impacted the end of Bronze Age palatial societies around 1200 BCE.
The recent publication by Martin Finné and others of a stalagmite found near the Palace of Nestor at Pylos adds a new record of local climate: it shows some association between a drying climate and the destruction of the palace. However, the picture is more nuanced than, say, a grand collapse due to a prolonged drought. A short period of aridity occurred about fifty years prior to the destruction of the palace. Fifty years after the palace’s destruction, a prolonged period of aridity stretched into the subsequent Early Iron Age.
But what if we look at more than just monuments or politics, and consider what foodways can tell us? Climate change didn’t destroy a palace; rather, it affected food production, which then impacted ancient states. Our understanding of ancient foodways needs to be integrated into our narratives of climate change and its relationship to civilization collapse or societal resilience.
My research at Nichoria, located near Pylos, has helped disprove an earlier idea that the Early Iron Age was a period of beef-ranching and pastoralism (it turns out cow bones survive better than those from smaller animals in acidic soil). Neither the changing climate nor the end of the palatial period caused people to abandon agriculture.
Instead, food production practices seem to have regionally diversified. These shifts might represent adaptations to the changing climate: people in different landscapes found different solutions. More research is needed to fill in the gaps. Nevertheless, a broader picture of diversity as a response to climate change is emerging.
Studying ancient food has the potential to do more than inform our knowledge of the past. In a compelling article, Erika Guttman-Bond argues that “archaeology can save the planet.” We need to look beyond examples of societal collapse — there are also many ancient examples of successful agricultural strategies in marginal environments.
Lithic mulches (essentially rock scatters on agricultural fields) have been found in dry landscapes across the world. Experiments have shown that these rock scatters retain moisture and nutrients in arid conditions. Raised fields, used for ancient agriculture in Peru, have been reintroduced and studied in the low-lying Lake Titicaca basin. Ancient agricultural methods can provide solutions to the various impacts of a changing climate, from increasing aridity to unpredictable rainfalls.
We are often obsessed with the new superfood, some easy answer. But agricultural ecology is a complex system encompassing human culture and the natural environment. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel. The more we learn about sustainable agriculture in the past, the more tools we have to face our future. And, with the benefit of hindsight, we can adapt the good without the bad. Biodiversity without slavery.
Most research in the ancient Mediterranean has focused on the texts, art, and monuments of the elite, but we are learning how important it is to expand our scope. Food was an essential component of everyone’s lives regardless of wealth, status, gender, and age.
Methods that weren’t available a decade or two ago are opening new frontiers into the study of foodways. We’re often told that ancient people ate less meat. Sure, that’s true, but it’s never so simple. Analysis of nitrogen and carbon isotopes can reveal the diet of an ancient person. Anna Lagia’s isotopic study of human remains from several ancient Athenian cemeteries shows that people ate large quantities of animal protein (meat, dairy, eggs, and fish) for a preindustrial population. No wonder so many urban animal bones were chopped by cleaver-wielding butchers.
But it wasn’t only the rich men who consumed lots of animal products. Most men and women in these Athenian cemeteries ate similarly high amounts. Only women found in the simplest types of graves consumed less. Also, a population of slaves from a cemetery near the mines at Laureion ate an “unexpectedly high” quantity of animal protein.
The picture from Athens contrasts with other sites. Anastasia Papathanasiou and others reveal clear dietary differences between men and women in wealthy graves at Late Bronze Age Pylos. Kristina Killgrove shows that millet, a lower-class grain, was eaten more by those living in the suburbs of Rome than those living in the city. Killgrove aptly notes that “there was no singular Roman diet.”
Each new study adds complexity and nuance to the larger picture. As we learn more about what ancient people ate, the next step is to understand better what their food ate. After all, Pollan highlights in his defense of food that “you are what what you eat eats too.”
The same isotopic methods can be applied to both plants and animals, allowing us to reveal ancient food systems in new detail. We no longer rely on the exceptional preservation around Pompeii to provide a lonely snapshot of a sustainable polyculture. Whether crops were fed manure or animals grazed far-flung pastures are questions we can now begin to answer.
We still have a ways to go when it comes to understanding ancient foodways. The first step is thinking away our industrial economy. I like to think that in doing so, we can start to imagine a more equitable and ecological post-industrial food economy.
It’s a slow process to record tens of thousands of animal bone fragments. But it’s totally worth it. From agriculture to cuisine, ancient foodways are revealed one bag of ancient trash at a time.
We currently live in a state of emergency. The effects of climate on our foodways has already impacted military conflicts and climate refugees. We should be investing in new technology, but we also need to invest in research in fields like environmental archaeology and history. As our society discusses sustainable foodways in the future, we need to look to the past to provide ideas and context.
Flint Dibble is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological Science of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. His upcoming project at Histria, Romania will investigate human-environment dynamics at the mouth of the Danube. He tweets about ancient food (@FlintDibble) and sometimes gets to grill and call it work.
Other Articles In This Special:
A Grad Student’s Guide to Free Food
The Sustainable Stoic
Hippocrates Would Have Wanted You To Eat Cake
Pour Some Pepper on Me
IV Ways to Sauté a Sow’s Vulva
